the history of my surname as i know it

It’s not clear how or exactly when my ancestors arrived in England, but they were without doubt Sephardic Jews. Somewhere along the line the surname became anglicised slightly, in that the pronunciation changed from ‘a villa’ to ‘avala’ with a hard middle ‘a’. Given the persecution that the Jews were subjected to through Spain, and the rest of Europe across history, the actions of my great great grandfather should come as no real surprise. He had a daughter and three sons, one of whom I am descended.
By that stage, I was told, my family had accrued a huge manor house in the country, with peacocks strutting across the lawns. He was a real freak, who doted on his daughter, and condemned the sons to grow up in the workers’ cottages at the bottom of his estates. When they turned 18 he horse-whipped them from his lands.
My great grandfather, foreswearing Judaism, was a drunk who died at the age of 45, having moved from the UK to Canada to the UK, he abandoned his wife, daughter and son after moving to Australia. My Great Grandmother was forced to become a ‘private nurse’ for wealthy old men. She had to leave my Grandpa Jim and Great Aunt in care, and wouldn’t see them for months. At one of these places when my grandpa Jim was seven, the carer, basically a mad farmer, had some odd ideas about hygiene. He would hose them down in a courtyard in the middle of winter once a week, and circumcised my grandfather with a kitchen knife.
Grandpa Jim met and married granny Molly, nee Bedford, and Andrew, Ian (my Dad) and Kay were the resultant issue, Kay apparently very quickly: upon the first contraction, Molly grabbed the bucket kept handy (because they slept upstairs and the loo was downstairs) and as her waters broke they carried Kay out along with them. My Dad tells me that Jim was pretty tough with them when they were kids; bashing his brother Andrew about. Dad once related a tale of defenestrating to escape Grandpa Jim’s rage. Fortunately, Jim managed to mellow across the years. His method of estimating what sort of a person you were was, upon first meeting, to immediately insult you, and then laugh like a drain. You either laughed along or were affronted, which meant he could relax or treat you with gloved disdain.
The night before Dad was born, so the story goes, granny Molly had seen a film about werewolves. Dad was born in 1943, with a caul, a wrapping of hair that lines the amniotic sack in the womb and is superstitiously regarded as proof against drowning, so Molly thought she’d borne a lycanthrope. Dad told me once of how a doodle bug landed a few houses away, bringing down all the plaster from the ceiling, and how scared Molly was, which made him very scared, and the crater was big enough to fit a London double decker into, which must be a very early memory indeed.
Perhaps because of a troubled home life, or the impact of the war on his childhood, Dad didn’t achieve much at his schooling, though became passionate about scouting. At 16 he went on a solo holiday to Spain, and at 18 signed up with ‘the big brother’ movement, an organization that exported young British men to help populate Australia. It was not the greatest of voyages, though Dad only really remembers the excitement of it. There were some problems on the ship, and because of his beard and the maturity his experiences had given him, he was unofficially delegated by the other boys on board as their spokesman. When they arrived in Sydney, they were all taken out to a farm at Cabramatta, at that stage still a rural area. Dad protested at being used as slave labour, a charge the ‘big brother’ movement represented as agricultural training, and told him to get stuffed,
On the word of a bloke that he met in a pub in England, he hitchhiked all the way up the east coast to Townsville, through the wet season. The road was unpaved back then, and I can recall Dad describing the difference between the two sorts of mud: black and red. The Red was the worst and easiest to get bogged in, as it was so slippery.
He arrived in Townsville in the middle of a recession. Luckily, the last lift he got into town was with a decent fellow, who, after establishing with Dad that his connection didn’t exist, gave Dad a bed for the night and use of a shower. The next morning Dad was driven to the labour exchange, where he was told of a job as a cowboy, on a station near Cloncurry, a remote township near Mt Isa. He couldn’t believe his good fortune: it was the dream job of his childhood. After reassuring the employment agency that he wouldn’t have any troubles sharing his quarters with a black, not sharing the incipient racism most Australians bore at the time, he made his way to the train station.
As he tells it, this was the first of many cultural shocks. The plan was to catch the train to Mt Isa, then hop a lift with the postman out to Cloncurry and the station. Dad had in his mind ‘English’ distances and standards. The train was effectively a goods train that never sped up and took forever. The postman was not a little red van but a road train. A cowboy in Australia mucks out the cow stall; those that ride the horses we call stockmen. After a few months, Dad begged the station manager to let him be a stockman too, which was granted, provided he maintained his previous duties, which he did.
After some time at this, dad and Ray, another stockman of the same age he’d befriended, took off round the country working on a carnival. After a further while at that, he and Ray set off in 1962-3 to go to England overland through Asia, the middle East, Eastern Europe (where they had a run in with the secret police), and Western Europe. When they got to the UK, they were pretty crook with hepatitis, though Ray kept sneaking out to the pub. When he was better, Dad looked up Mum first of all his old crew, as she was the only one who’d maintained contact with him through his adventures.
One thing followed another and in 1965 my older brother was born. After a couple of years in the UK, my parents became 10 pound Poms, and migrated to Australia. Dad says he’d been feeling a growing desperation in England, where the freedom of spirit he’d gained had been worn down by the relentless slog of being in England, and putting up with the English, so for him it was a great relief to arrive in Surfers Paradise.
Looking for the riches that the frontier of Australia had to offer, Dad went fossicking for opals in SW Queensland for six months with an English bloke who claimed to be ex WW2 SAS. At the end of the trip, they were ready to kill each other, and split the prospected boulder opal between them.
My parents moved to Sydney, where Mum got a job and Dad went to Uni. I was born toward the end of his degree.